Who is armand hammer

I remember interviewing him when he was trying to drill for oil off Pacific Palisades, a project violently opposed by residents, environmentalists and just about everyone who enjoyed the beach. So desperate was he for favorable publicity that he even consented to talk to me, a reporter from City Hall. His father was an old Bolshevik who had come to the United States from his native Russia.

Armand Hammer was feted whenever he visited Moscow. The Russians cut him in on big business deals. What explanation was there except that Hammer was playing for the other team?

From that connection flowed other business deals, some profitable for Hammer, others not, but all of them of great use to the Soviet Union. When a railroad station boss demanded a bribe to move food to the mine, the Cheka stepped in again and, as Hammer liked to boast, the station commandant was shot. His relationship with the Soviet secret police is just one--and for me the most interesting--revelation in a book that is a model of biographical research.

When finished, he has provided a painful look at the corruptibility of government and the gullibility of the business, economic and social elite. But I have some favorites:. His father, in whose office Hammer was working, took the fall for him and went to prison. Dealing with the Soviets, he was an atheist. When developing oil fields in Muslim Libya, he was a Unitarian.

Only when death neared did Hammer return to Judaism and, in fact, schedule a lavish bar mitzvah ceremony, but he died before it took place. On December 10, , the American businessman Armand Hammer — who published two autobiographies extolling his own business acumen and his many humanitarian endeavors, but who has been portrayed by several independent biographers in terms far less flattering — died, at the age of His parents, however, Julius Hammer and the former Rose Robinson Lifschitz, were both born in Ukrainian Russia, and had emigrated with their respective families to the U.

Julius was a druggist and later a medical doctor and businessman, and also a very committed socialist, as well as a founder of the American Communist Party. It was his idea to name his first son for the symbol of the U.

Socialist Labor Party, a muscular arm gripping a hammer, although later in life, Armand gave other explanations for his name. Armand graduated from Morris High School, in the Bronx, in He attended both college and medical school at Columbia University, earning a medical degree in He never practiced medicine, however.

In , his father was sent to prison, and Armand had to take over management of his small drug company. Julius, it turns out, had performed an illegal abortion in his home clinic, and when his patient died, he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter.

But retirement soon bored Hammer, and he began looking for new ventures. In he obtained control of the Mutual Broadcasting Company and turned it over for a profit. A year earlier he had agreed to finance two wildcat oil wells for tiny Occidental Petroleum Company, and when both were successful he increased his holdings and was soon named president and chairman of the board.

Under Hammer's leadership Occidental diversified into chemicals, coal, and fertilizers, and in he returned to his Soviet connection, signing a multi-billion dollar, year chemical fertilizer agreement under which a fertilizer plant would be built in the Soviet Union from which Occidental would receive supplies for sale abroad. Art collecting was Hammer's principal hobby starting in the s, but his approach was always to share his collection with as many people as possible, based on his conviction that art is an important force for understanding among people of all cultures.

In he donated a multi-million dollar collection of works by Dutch, Flemish, German, and Italian masters of the 15th through 17th centuries to the University of California at Los Angeles and other works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In he added more paintings to the County Museum and gave a large group of old masters to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.

Hammer also owned three important collections, including more than works by such masters as Rembrandt, Renoir, and Rubens, which traveled for exhibition throughout the world. Hammer's concern for understanding among peoples led him in to donate the former Campobello Island estate of President Franklin Roosevelt, whom Hammer served as an adviser during World War II, as an international peace park. He also sponsored international conferences to bring experts together to discuss solutions to problems of human rights and world peace.

Another of Hammer's concerns was the effort to find a cure for cancer. He was a board member of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation starting in In his 80s Hammer still put in hour days, seven days a week. He once remarked that he would be willing to pay Occidental Petroleum for the privilege of letting him work. In he sponsored medical aid for the Russians injured in the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

Along with his humanitarian work, Hammer also left himself open to severe criticism regarding his use of funds from Occidental stockholders. It is said he used company funds for many personal amenities and to buy works of art.